Product Tour

Play SOA Planning Tour

SOA Planning

In companies embracing SOA, Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) is enjoying a surge in significance. Best practice EAM already recognizes several of the issues involved in SOA and strategic planning products such as planningIT support these concepts:

• a single, central repository containing all planning-relevant information on all architecture artefacts
• thorough examination of requests for change to the architecture
• strict adherence to standards and guidelines
• transparent and measurable IT/business relationship issues
• an architecture roadmap defining the incremental steps on the way to the desired target architecture
• a collaborative process for cooperative planning and implementation

So that, in general, SOA does not require a new approach to enterprise architecture. SOA does confront the architecture team with new challenges in respect to services, however, and in embarking on the SOA path the EA group often finds that

• business architecture is not structured for reusability
• the company lacks an enterprise-wide, uniform service classification
• services important to the enterprise cannot be readily identified
• deficiencies in the current service implementation cannot be readily identified
• services as inherent elements of the EA lack a governed process for their creation
• service creation and maintenance is distributed across the enterprise

This unsatisfactory situation causes the EA team to intensify focus on certain issues such as identifying the truly mission critical business processes, and strategic IT planning involving an evolutionary process with a vision and intermediary steps to get there. Additionally the EA team needs to strengthen discipline in areas such as implementing strict governance processes and standards and maintaining a transparent, documented architecture despite the large number of EA elements needed to be handled.

This product tour on SOA Planning demonstrates how planningIT helps organizations:

• centralize services planning to avoid redundancy
• shape the business architecture for introducing SOA
• manage SOA planning with a collaborative process for proper governance

Watch this planningIT tour on www.youtube.com.